Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

eighteenth-century automata of Jacques de Vaucanson, on display for a full century,
included a flute player and a food-digesting duck. Von Kempelen’s infamous
chess-playing Turk first appeared in 1770; it was in and out of the public eye until its
destruction by fire in 1854 (Standage, 2002).
Wood (2002, p. xxvii) notes that all automata are presumptions “that life can
be simulated by art or science or magic. And embodied in each invention is a
riddle, a fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human.” In the
eighteenth century, this challenge attracted the attention of the Catholic Church.
In 1727, Vaucanson’s workshop was ordered destroyed because his clockwork servants,
who served dinner and cleared tables, were deemed profane (Wood, 2002).
The Spanish Inquisition imprisoned both Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his writing
automaton!
In spite of the Church’s efforts, eighteenth-century automata were popular, tapping
into a nascent fascination with the possibility of living machines. This fascination
has persisted uninterrupted to the present day, as evidenced by the many depictions
of robots and cyborgs in popular fiction and films (Asimov, 2004; Caudill, 1992;
Grenville, 2001; Ichbiah, 2005; Levin, 2002; Menzel, D’Aluisio, & Mann, 2000).
Not all modern automata were developed as vehicles of entertainment. The
late 1940s saw the appearance of the first autonomous robots, which resembled,
and were called, Tortoises (Grey Walter, 1963). These devices provided “mimicry of
life” (p. 114) and were used to investigate the possibility that living organisms were
simple devices that were governed by basic cybernetic principles. Nonetheless, Grey
Walter worried that animism might discredit the scientific merit of his work:
We are daily reminded how readily living and even divine properties are projected
into inanimate things by hopeful but bewildered men and women; and the
scientist cannot escape the suspicion that his projections may be psychologically
the substitutes and manifestations of his own hope and bewilderment. (Grey
Walter, 1963, p. 115)
While Grey Walter’s Tortoises were important scientific contributions (Bladin, 2006;
Hayward, 2001; Holland, 2003b; Sharkey & Sharkey, 2009), the twentieth century
saw the creation of another, far more important, automaton: the digital computer.
The computer is rooted in seventeenth-century advances in logic and mathematics.
Inspired by the Cartesian notion of rational, logical, mathematical thought, the
computer brought logicism to life.
Logicism is the idea that thinking is identical to performing logical operations
(Boole, 2003). By the end of the seventeenth century, numerous improvements to
Boole’s logic led to the invention of machines that automated logical operations;
most of these devices were mechanical, but electrical logic machines had also been
conceived (Buck & Hunka, 1999; Jevons, 1870; Marquand, 1885; Mays, 1953). If
Multiple Levels of Investigation 21